TXKajun... Hey, There many vistors on his forum who do not post. While Texas is not known for gold, it is known for meteorites ... Check any vendors who display them... Also there are coins and other stuff more unique to Texas... Different Strokes for Different folks... Keep us up to date...

Made it to the El Paso Gold Show Saturday and had a blast. From talking to folks who had been to the Mesa show, this was a small show. About 25-30 dealers, GPAA booth, PLP booth, NM GPAA booth, and good times. Saturday attendance was only 412, according to the GPAA folks.

There were some nice door prizes and raffle prizes for both days. I managed to win a Garret metal detector backpack in the door prize category. Woohoo! It holds a detector, coils, water, shovel, whatever else. Sweet! A guy spent $400 and managed to win a very nice nugget and the grand prize.....a 2 week trip to Alaska! A big investment, but big return, no? I sucked big time at the gold panning contest! LOL

I picked up some personal tips on operating my Xterra 705 from Kevin Hougland from Minelab. He also gave a great talk on detecting as well as a super talk on Alaska trips. Also saw a Blue Bowl in action. Nope, I ain't doing nothing wrong.

As far as purchases, a few minor ones....a couple of magnets, leveling feet for my Blue Bowl, an orange Black Sand Magnet (BOM), and one kinda big purchase.....a ProGold Prospecting Black Magic fine gold recovery system. Of all the "gadgets" I saw, this was the most useful to me, I think.

Also ran into the president of Desert Gold Diggers, Inc of Arizona. I'm gonna join and get access to their claims, hopefully this weekend. WOOHOO!!!

Tom Massey was a no show, due to a death in his wife's family, supposedly. Drat.

All in all, it was a good intro to the Gold Shows. Not too big, not too small.

A brief update on the Black Magic Fine Gold Recovery System (sorry for the delay, but r/l has a tendency of getting in the way of fun things! LOL).

Got a tub set up with water and Jet Dry, hooked up my Black Magic system and got water flowing. Bad news.....the surface of the Black Magic system didn't let water flow over it smoothly. Got out the directions (imagine that! ROFL), read where you had to really rub in the water/Jet Dry (quite a bit of Jet Dry, about 3X as much as I usually use) as it was flowing. Did that, got smooth flow, adjusted angle and water flow speed so that top of the rubber mat looked like glass (yeah, sounds strange, but that's about what it is. No bubbles, no ripples, just smooth glass-like flow of water).

I had some material from a claim up by Carrizozo, NM that I'd worked several months ago and found a little bit of color in. I classified down to -30, then washed it real good while it was in my 100 seive, then took a magnet and got out a bunch of magnetic sand. I started running it, about a tablespoon at a time. Put it on, spread it out, rubbed it to spread a bit more, and just let the board do its thing while I sipped a little bit of scotch. Add some more cons, sip some more scotch. Repeat as needed. I tried to set up an auto feeder, but it didn't work. Drat! Gonna have to think some more on that.

After running about half of my material, I ended up getting a surprising amount of really tiny gold out! And the material had already been processed 3X! WOOHOO! It got everything from little tiny pieces to almost microscopic pieces. Just took my finger, smoothed the gold all into one place and snuffered it out. I tried the -100, but no gold.

I was prepared to be a little disappointed, but instead, I was highly impressed! It is a reasonably priced piece of equipment, comes with all you need except a spoon, tub and Jet Dry, is easy to use AND it worked like advertised. I think the inventor has a real winner here! I think next time I head up to Lincoln County, NM I'm gonna take my 1/4" classifier, colander classifier, #20 classifier, #30 classifier, #100 classifier and buckets to take home only the -30/+100.

I found dry classifying the original material through 1/4" and then down through my colander classifier and then using wet classifying on the -20 to 100 mesh works best. So, I'll bring water, too. Oh yeah! This is a long holiday weekend for me! WOOHOO!

By the way, this item has been remarked on here in Rob's forum before, a couple of years ago.

Kajun
P.S.
Anyone want to buy a used Blue Bowl with the leveling feet???